Umbra

• Luke Neville, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2011

His eyes were the colour of sparkling diamonds, no, sapphires. Then rubies. Then sunflowers. With each blink they changed. An infinite rainbow of the colour spectrum contained solely within his irises, no warning just a twitch of the eyelids and he was new.
He sat with his hands atop his knees, his arms running parallel to his legs; those ever changing eyes scanned the room, twitching.
It was of a single consistent colour, white, as bright as a burning star, intense like the sun. It boasted no defining features, no characteristics of a typical room. No windows, no doors, only sources of artificial light to illuminate its seemingly infinite border.
Suddenly his eyes twitched at the sound of escaping air, at the sight of a hole in the wall to his left, a hole where one had not been before. An elderly man in a deep gray coat entered, stopped at the sight of the boy already sitting there, smiled as he noted how attentive his eyes were.
Other than his silver hair, he bore no extreme signs of aging; rather he resembled a handsome man in his early fifties with twinkling blue eyes. Despite his appearance, he had about him an aura of wisdom that seemed to sweep through the air whispering that he was much older than he seemed.
His name was Ballard Goliath and as he sat down on a chair that had arisen from the bright white floor the boy remained intrigued by him, followed him with eyes of twinkling blue until they came face to face.
“My name is Ballard Goliath,” said the old man his hand pointed to his chest.
“My name is James Goliath, and you are my father.” The boy responded.
“Indeed I am,” Ballard smiled “and who is your mother might I ask?”
“Mary, Mary Goliath.” He said autonomously as if he were a robot.
Ballard considered the boy’s responses, his tone of response, compared it mentally to his memories. The boy looked like his son, talked like his son, but did not sound like his son. He continued asking questions, he needed to know if it had been a success, had to know where and if he’d gone wrong, where to improve.
“What happened the day of June 19, 1965?” Ballard asked.
Suddenly the boys’ eyes tore away from Ballard, his face scrunched in thought; he remained silent for almost half an hour thinking, or at least pretending to think.
As far as patient men go, Ballard had been waiting fifty years for this moment, he could wait all night, soon, however, the boy’s silence disturbed him and so without word he stood to leave, had almost exited the white room when the boy spoke.
“It was a hot day. The countryside was green and soaked in dew. We were headed home from polo, from my polo match. You were driving, mother was beside you and I was sitting in the back. The road was empty, it was a hot day. You tried to wipe the sweat from your face, only a few beads and then we hit something, something hard, another car. There was screaming. Mother was dead, you were alive. I died.”
Ballard turned back to face the boy, saw tears welling in his eyes, hope filled him flutteringly, was it success after all? Had his dream of bringing his son back to him finally been realised?
As a single tear ran down the boy’s face, his kind and loving father wiped it away, placed hands on his face and looked into the eyes that he had sorely missed.
“Am I dead?” asked the boy.
“No, not anymore son, not anymore.”
He hugged his son, tighter than he thought possible, fifty years of constant hard work had culminated into this being before him, this person who had remained absent being before him, this person who had remained absent from his life for half a century, his son.
As he pulled away from the boy his dreams were shattered in the blink of an eye. Those once twinkling blue spheres were now deep purple, now lime green, iridescent yellow.
Ballard jumped from his seat, the tears in his eyes were at risk of combusting as rage and frustration crippled his intelligent mind until it become a shadow of its former self.
He had thought he’d done it, had thought that he was reuniting himself with his dead family, that he’d finally be happy again, that the moment he’d been dreaming of since that hot summer day was here, but he had thought wrong.
“Father,” said the boy with eyes like the Milky Way.
“Yes.”
“Does this mean that mother is alive too?”
“Yes.”
“Where is she? Can I see her? I’d love to see her.”
“No, you mustn’t”
“But father why?”
“Because,” he said, pulling a pistol from his coat “you are not my son.”
Between eyes of murky silver, Ballard fired a bullet into the boy’s forehead and without a second glance he left the white room. The boy lay there on the white floor, dead, covered in the blood of his father’s son, his eyes a twinkling blue.